I'm spurred to read "Spurs," but "Spurs" is not an ebook, so I'm off the hook. Still, here's some text visible in Google books. Derrida is playing with the the possible meaning(s) of "I have forgotten my umbrella," found (in quotation marks) in Nietzche's unpublished manuscripts. Excerpt:

The umbrella's symbolic figure is well-known, or supposedly so. Take, for example, the hermaphroditic spur of a phallus which is modestly enfolded in its veils, an organ which is at once aggressive and apotropaic, threatening and/or threatened. One doesn't just happen onto an unwonted object of this sort in a sewing-machine on a castration table.

"Unwonted" is not a typo. Unlike "unwanted," it's not commonly heard/seen. It means: "not commonly heard, seen, practised." So says the OED, which tells us that Charlotte Brontë used "unwonted" in "Jane Eyre": "Difficulties in habituating myself to new rules and unwonted tasks." Are there umbrellas in "Jane Eyre"?

A walk in the park is a cliché that signifies an extremely easy activity. If you don't know a walk in the park is relaxing, how on earth do these city people survive in the hectic, harried environment I keep reading about?

We've been talking about Obama and umbrellas this morning — here, here, and here — and, as noted, I bought the Kindle version of Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams" so I could search for "umbrella," which I remembered as a famous Freudian symbol.

All elongated objects, sticks, tree-trunks, umbrellas (on account of the opening, which might be likened to an erection), all sharp and elongated weapons, knives, daggers, and pikes, represent the male member...

Small boxes, chests, cupboards, and ovens correspond to the female organ; also cavities, ships, and all kinds of vessels.

What then would Freud say about Obama's writing a book called "Dreams From My Father" in which he depicts a scene (perhaps concocted for dramatic effect) in which he is crying in the rain between the small boxes that are the graves of his father and grandfather and his brother is suddenly there holding an opened umbrella? To ask that question is already to see the answer.

To ask the question is to see the answer! Indeed, to ask the question is to see innumerable phallic symbols in the photograph. Here, inspect this huge enlargement. Oh, my! It's a world of wonder. The shape of those windowed doors! Obama's 2-thumbs-up gesture. The lectern stands. The microphones. The medals. The arrows in the claws of the eagles on the seals. The umbrellas, one more erect than the other.

According to the WaPo article, the U.S. military might believe that umbrellas are effeminate. Dr. Freud says no, no absolutely not. They are quite masculine, especially when erect. Getting a rigidly erect male to hold erect umbrella over you and another rigidly erect male to hold another albeit slightly less erect umbrella over a world leader? It's the most masculine image ever seen!

It's no wonder the President's detractors are irked. In the Freudian analysis, we know the source of the anxiety that motivates them to drag him down with assertions that umbrellas are not manly.

Now, I'm astounded to see that the umbrella figures importantly in the book — and it is even an umbrella held over him by another man (his younger brother Bernard). This happens at the end of what is the most dramatic scene in the book, on the last page of the final chapter. Obama, in Africa, falls to the ground between the graves of his father and his grandfather and cries. He's crying about a lack of "a faith that wasn’t new, that wasn’t black
or white or Christian or Muslim but that pulsed in the heart of the
first African village and the first Kansas homestead—a faith in other
people."

And for lack of
faith you clung to both too much and too little of your past. Too much
of its rigidness, its suspicions, its male cruelties.

He expresses the idea that their "male cruelties" should have been moderated by more of "the laughter in Granny’s voice, the pleasures of company while herding the goats, the murmur of the market, the stories around the fire... Words of encouragement. An embrace. A strong, true love." That is, the over-masculinity should have been mixed with more feminine things, things that "could make up for a lack of airplanes or rifles." There's a theory of gender here: "you could never forge yourself into a whole man by leaving those things behind."

If umbrella-holding conveys a message of unmanliness, it is a vivid image of impotence. It's a symbol.

Umbrellas are a famously Freudian symbol, and I was going to embellish that last post with some stray erudition. But the post was already too long. (Too long!!) And here was Nabokov, taking a swipe at the elderly gentleman from Vienna way back in 1966.

Interestingly, Nabokov is also talking about something else that was a topic in the Obama-and-the-umbrella post:

I'm not a good speaker, you see. When I start to speak, I have immediately four or five lines of thought — sort of roads, you know, trails going various ways. And I have to decide which trail I'm going to follow, and while I decide this, hawing and hemming begins, and it may be very upsetting because I hear it myself. I can never understand those limpid, fluid speakers, as my father was, who just deliver perfect phrases, beautifully built, with an aphorism here, you know, and a metaphor there. I can't do it. I have to think it out; I have to take a pencil; I have to write it down laboriously; have it before me. I do things like that. It's probably psychological. I can imagine what old Freud would have said, whom I heartily detest, as my readers know by now.

But Obama's comical stylings didn't play as well this week as they have in the past. I'm reading "Obama puts Marines on umbrella duty, irking conservatives" only because I'm interested in figuring out why it's #1 on the "most popular" list in the sidebar at The Washington Post. Something cute about the headline, I thought. But reading it — and looking at that photograph of Obama intentionally clowning with the white-gloved Marine — I'm seeing something tragic. The old ways — that made us love him — don't work anymore. The gentle, slow-talking, stalling with "uhs" for Woody Allen-like timing:

"Uh I am going to go ahead and ask, folks, why don’t we get a couple of Marines — they’re going to look good next to us — just 'cause uh uh — I wanna — I’ve got a change of suits but I don’t know about uh uh uh our prime uh our prime minister. Uh there we go. That’s good. [To the reporters:] You guys, I’m sorry about but but let let let uh uh mmm uh let me uh uh uuuuhhh make sure that I answer a specific question...."

He told the Hollywood Reporter he would like to spend some of the prize money on a Segway, a new apartment, investments and "a lot of wireless gizmos and stuff."

On the finale, Cochran said he would like to become a writer rather than a lawyer. Asked about his paper about Survivor, Cochran told the Hollywood Reporter it was “basically Survivor for Dummies” and wasn’t that great....

“It wasn't showing any great insight into how to manage the Survivor jury,” Cochran said. “It gave maybe a brief overview of maybe what sort of strategies work and what don't, but it's not especially insightful. That's why I haven't released it. It's just gonna shatter everyone's illusions that I've written some sort of brilliant thing. It's not brilliant at all. It's embarrassing, so I'm gonna keep it a mystery."

Ha ha. Is the new book going to be insight into Survivor or insight into modesty? Or... may I recommend... a memoir of traveling around America on a Segway? If so, scoot through Madison, Wisconsin, because we love those things around here.

As I blogged here yesterday, Drudge had this dramatic graphic depiction...

... linking to a NYT article with the headline: "Treasury Knew of I.R.S. Inquiry in 2012, Official Says." Key text on that point:

The inspector general... divulged that he informed the Treasury’s general counsel he was auditing the I.R.S.’s screening of politically active groups seeking tax exemptions on June 4, 2012. He told Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin “shortly after,” he said. That meant Obama administration officials were aware of the matter during the presidential campaign year.

This morning, the headline at the link is: "Republicans Expand I.R.S. Inquiry, With Eye on White House."

It's all about the Republicans' political ambitions. That's the spin. That's what they have. We're supposed to look ahead to 2014 (and 2016), not back to 2012, when voters were deprived of information we could have used.

In that view, the NYT's new headline makes sense. Look always to the future. The past only matters to the extent that it influences what we do going forward. In that view, the scandal investigations are to be understood in terms of the next election. Naturally. What else is there?

What an awful witness! (And I say that after watching much of today's testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee.)

ADDED: To help you think about what might be an appropriate question read this ("Exemption requirements") and this ("Exempt purposes"). Miller seemed to actively resist giving us any idea how the requested details might have been anything but harassment, even as he squirmed away from a simple denouncement of the request.

If you have no doubt of your premises or your power, and want a certain result with all your heart, you naturally express your wishes in law, and sweep away all opposition.... But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.

"... or say what we believe is right or true because that would upset the company's brand. This fanatical obsession with message control to me is very much what you have in a company but in a democracy that shouldn't be the case."

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If it were possible to gay marry Ronald Reagan, Clint Eastwood, and my own late father, Clark Sutton would be the fruit of that union. Of course Ronald Reagan, Clint Eastwood, and Dad are probably the last three guys who would ever gay marry. Next best thing: "Mutterings," by Clark Eugene Sutton.

Today was the official opening ceremony for Dane County's 7th dog park — the same dog park you've seen pictured on this blog many times. It's not like it's been closed. It's just that today they had some officials making speeches and some TV cameras. When the speeches were over, it was time to release the dogs, who were supposed to go romping out into the park for some nice TV footage.

Meade was there, getting some blog-style video, which I edited into this 27-second show, stressing the experience for the dogs, who had no idea what these government officials have done for them or what all the talking was about:

Says the New York Times, about Huma Abedin and her work for private clients while serving in the State Department in her longtime role as Hillary Clinton's confidante.

Ms. Abedin reached her new working arrangement in June 2012, when she returned from maternity leave, quietly leaving her position as deputy chief of staff and becoming a special government employee, which is essentially a consultant. A State Department official said that change freed her from the requirement that she disclose her private earnings for the rest of the year on her financial disclosure forms. Still, during that period, she continued to be identified publicly in news reports as Mrs. Clinton’s deputy chief of staff.

Earlier this month, Mr. Weiner released a copy of the couple’s 2012 tax return showing that they had income of more than $490,000.

From today's NYT article, we hear that the post-maternity leave "arrangement allowed her to work from her home in New York, rather than at the State Department’s headquarters in Washington."

She earned approximately $135,000 from the department during 2012. It is not clear how much Ms. Abedin was paid by Mrs. Clinton privately, or from the Clinton Foundation and Teneo. The Clintons have described Ms. Abedin as a surrogate daughter to them.

ADDED: What work did she do? Did the Clintons just funnel money to her and Weiner?

We're not talking about water soluble paint, but permanent paint jobs, the equivalent of murals, but on the horizontal surface that cars drive on. The alderwoman who proposes the new ordinance — Marsha Rummel — got the idea from Portland, Oregon, "where community members paint an intersection to give it a sense of place and create a public square."

There would be a permit process, including a petition "indicating approval from at least 60 percent residents, businesses and non-residential properties within a 200-foot radius of the proposed location" and "assurances for the city that hold the design's applicant responsible for maintenance of the painting and requires them to have insurance." (I'm quoting the Cap Times article, not the ordinance, so I don't know whom to blame for the irritating ambiguity.)

"You can't just say you want to come in and do this. It needs to be maintained over time. Paint fades. It needs to be repainted from time to time, just as we go and repaint traffic lines," said Arthur Ross, the city's pedestrian-bicycle coordinator.

Which is why it's obviously a terrible idea.

"What it really is is a community building activity. It gets people out of their houses and working on something together," Ross said.

And what about when it breaks them apart because it's ugly, it makes the neighborhood look trashy, and it's not properly maintained. I loathe these government dreams of bringing people together. Leave us alone! I know it's Madison, but people have their own private ways of getting together.

Miller said that “foolish mistakes” were made by IRS employees who were trying to be “more efficient” in carrying out their duties. Now, he said, “the agency is moving forward.”...

Under sharper questioning by Rep. Charles W. Boustany Jr. (R-La.), Miller denied that the IRS engaged in “targeting” conservative groups, saying that was a “pejorative term” and that the employees had centralized a “list” of applications in a “troublesome” manner....

Miller said later in response to tough questions from Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Tex.) that he did not believe any IRS information on the conservative groups was shared outside the agency. “That would be a violation of law,” he said. “I would be shocked if that happened.”

"... and it thereby defines what used to be known as a career," wrote Jacques Barzun to his grandson, the lawprof, Charles Barzun, quoted by my son Jaltcoh here. The grandson had asked for help with what he called "a genuine crisis of identity... "brought on by the events of 9/11 and partly by my own discovery that I could not have cared less about my job." The grandfather assured him that he would find his way, which would look "like a path marked on a map" and "you will have made a Self, which is indeed a desirable possession."

The elder Barzun likens identity to a path and then to a rudder. Life is a journey. That's a very widely used metaphor. All these people who think of life as a journey: What are they picturing? Do they see a wilderness where you can find — or break — a path? Or do they see a map where you can mark a path? Or is it a journey over the ocean, in which your body is a ship, and what you want is a rudder?

The seafaring image implicit in Barzun's "rudder" made me think of that popular old poem that ends "I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul." I haven't heard that poem — "Invictus" — quoted in a long time, perhaps because it was overquoted to the point of triteness and nowadays people don't read poetry — other than in children's books. They'll listen to poetry, including the endless doggerel of rap (which is, perhaps, inspired by many childhood readings of Dr. Seuss books). But there was a time when lots of ordinary people knew the last verse of "Invictus" by heart.

In the 1945 film Kings Row, Parris Mitchell, a psychiatrist played by Robert Cummings, recites the first two stanzas of "Invictus" to his friend Drake McHugh, played by Ronald Reagan, before revealing to Drake that his legs were unnecessarily amputated by a cruel doctor.

Next, another President, FDR, at least the FDR of the 1958 play Sunrise at Campobello. Further down we encounter Nelson Mandela, who recited the poem to hearten his fellow prisoners. There's also Aung San Suu Kyi. And then... it's chilling to encounter this after beginning this post with the crisis of identity brought on by 9/11:

"It wasn't massively appropriate, and Candice looked bewildered and nervous at times so it's to her utter credit that she still took the title home. Perhaps realising her mistake, and possibly performing on autopilot, Hudson tried to chivvy the younger singer along at the song's close."

It's kind of true. "AI" brought in 2 gigantic soul-singing divas as if to launch their new counterpart, Candice (whom I'm sure the producers knew would win) and those 2, each in her own way, stepped on Candice's moment.

It was a funny season of "Idol." It turned out to be a singing contest in which the best singer won. She didn't play to the cameras and beg for our love. She tried to win on the merits, and did. But — isn't it the way things always go? — the show is in steep decline. Where's the audience? Maybe the people who are left really just like great singing and not the attendant hammy bullshit. That makes no sense. That's an utterly irrational way to go looking for great singing.

On Friday, Republicans leaked what they said was a quote from Rhodes: "We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don't want to undermine the FBI investigation."

But it turns out that in the actual email, Rhodes did not mention the State Department.

It read: "We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation."

So the Republicans inserted fake language? Or is the "actual email" not the actual email?

Republicans also provided what they said was a quote from an email written by State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland.... "The penultimate point is a paragraph talking about all the previous warnings provided by the Agency (CIA) about al-Qaeda's presence and activities of al-Qaeda."

The actual email from Nuland says: "The penultimate point could be abused by members to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings."

So the version of the email we're now seeing refers to "The penultimate point" but is missing a sentence saying what "The penultimate point is..."? I'm skeptical!

In the video, police had to repeat some questions when Chandler failed to respond or when the number of times he blinked appeared unclear. But Chandler blinked his eyes hard three times when police asked him if the photo of Woods was the photo of his shooter. He again blinked three times when they asked him if he was sure.

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Obama rejected the idea at his news conference today, saying "Between those investigations [by Congress and the Justice Department] I think we’re going to be able to figure out exactly what happened, who was involved, what went wrong, and we’re going to be able to implement steps to fix it."

He also said: "I promise you this, that the minute I found out about it, then my main focus was making sure that we get the thing fixed... I'm outraged by this in part because look, I'm a public figure, if a future administration is starting to use the tax laws to favor one party over another or one political view over another, obviously, we’re all vulnerable."

I still want a special prosecutor because I just don't trust them not to cover up. The minute I found out about it, then my main focus was making sure that we get the thing fixed. I don't think people believe that. I don't believe it. And when was "the minute [he] found out about it"? He keeps making statements about finding out things around about whenever we do... which is absurdly self-serving, as if the only problems are public relations problems. Apparently, nothing exists for him until we learn about it!

Said I, as quoted in The New Yorker today in a piece by Paul Bloom called "The Dzhokar Tsarnaev Empathy Problem." I was being sarcastic and criticizing the media for using a strikingly baby-faced picture of Tsarnaev in practically every report.

Bloom concludes:

Relying on the face might be human nature—even babies prefer to look at attractive people. But, of course, judging someone based on the geometry of his features is, from a moral and legal standpoint, no better than judging him based on the color of his skin. Actually, both biases reflect the parochial and irrational nature of empathy—if Tsarnaev were black, would he evoke the same response from the mothers [Hanna Rosin described here]? When someone talks about the warm feelings she has for Tsarnaev because of his sweet face, we should treat this with the same wary understanding that we would give to someone who admits to caring more about those who have the same color skin. It’s an empathetic response, and a natural one, but hardly one to be proud of.

Bloom says nothing about the baby-faced picture of Trayvon Martin that the media tended to use. Sweet faces manipulate us emotionally even when they are black. And an individual's face isn't quite the same as his skin color, because the mind is revealed through the face (albeit incompletely and often deceptively). Bloom displays the media's favorite photo of Jared Loughner and declares that we don't feel much empathy toward that face. But the problem with that face is not inborn ugliness. It's craziness in the expression. We are properly repelled by that.

It is the true sociopath — I would suggest — whose does evil things but keeps a normal-looking face. We need to challenge ourselves to recognize the sociopaths in our midst. And let's not try to overcome our aversion to faces like Loughner's or Adam Lanza's. These people have terrible problems that we ignore at great risk.

ADDED: The post title corrects a typo that appears in The New Yorker ("bothers" for "brothers").

"It's managed to stay isolated for almost half the lifetime of the Earth," [said Greg Holland, a geochemist at Lancaster University in England]. It's a time capsule. And it doesn't just hold water. "There's a lot of hydrogen in these samples."

That's significant because hydrogen is food for some microorganisms. Hydrogen-eating microbes have been found deep in the ocean and in South African mines where chemical reactions in the rock produce a steady supply of hydrogen. And that hydrogen, says Holland, "could provide the energy for life to survive in isolation for 2 billion years."

Now, do you see why we need to go to Mars?

Or do you think that we ought to start worrying about alien microbes liberated from the depths of Earth?

These works really are valuable, because they are the last great works in the history of painting — if we are to understand the history of painting as the era when people paid attention to and cared about what painters were painting.

The note was written in pen on a bullet-riddled wall of the cabin, and reportedly said America’s military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan was the reason behind the deadly April 15 bombings at the Boston Marathon, sources told CBS News. The message reportedly said the victims — three killed and more than 260 injured — were collateral damage similar to Muslims who've died in U.S.-led wars.

“When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims,” the note said....

Tsarnaev, 19, also reportedly wrote that he didn’t mourn older brother and alleged bombing mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in an earlier gun battle with cops. He referred to him as a martyr in paradise....

The San Fernando group first submitted its application for nonprofit status in the fall of 2010, which was after the IRS’s Cincinnati-based “determination unit” had implemented its politically charged screening criteria. The group wrote the agency a $400 check to fast-track the process, but 19 months went by before the group heard anything, Kenney said.

So they stole $400 from this group! How many other $400s were pocketed on false pretenses?

That’s when the long list of questions arrived. Kenney said the group sent back a four-inch, seven-pound stack of documents before deciding that enough was enough. The group decided the questions were far too intrusive and could result in individual supporters being targeted.

That was the Supreme Court's landmark case on the freedom-of-speech-based right of association. Ironically, the IRS behavior has been explained as a response to another Supreme Court free-speech case, Citizens United. From the first link above (which goes to the WaPo article "Groups that sought tax-exempt status say IRS dealings were a nightmare") :

Lois G. Lerner, who heads the IRS’s tax-exemption division, described the targeting campaign as a misguided attempt to deal with a wave of applications after the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which allowed corporations and labor unions to spend unlimited sums on politics.

How many times did Obama say that he was looking for ways to get around Citizens United? How hard did he try to equate "Citizens United" with evil corporations and the money's unfair effect on politics? And here his administration was going after grass-roots groups who were organizing not to lobby for corporate welfare, but to express ideas about limited government and the meaning of the Constitution!

So I started calling other groups and I thought I would file and create an organization, and here they were all getting targeted by the IRS, and I got scared....

"Send us your Facebook pages, your Twitter pages," and I said, "Does that include personal pages?" and they said, "Everything." They wanted to know your personal relationships with politicians and political parties. And I asked, "What would happen if I don't send this to you?" and they said, they made an insinuation like, "Look, it can be considered perjury if you omit things from the IRS." I'm a pregnant stay-at-home mother on one income, I thought, "Oh, my goodness, I'm not doing anything." I stopped.

"[I]t is almost as if Boxer is living in a time warp, repeating talking points from six months ago that barely acknowledge the fact that extensive investigations have found little evidence of her claim that 'there was not enough security because the budget was cut.' State Department officials repeatedly told Congress that a lack of funds was not an issue. Instead, security was hampered because of bureaucratic issues and management failures. In other words, given the internal failures, no amount of money for the State Department likely would have made a difference in this tragedy."

Why wasn't the opposition party oppositional enough? Where was the supervision? Why did Romney crumple mid-attack in the second debate? Where was the vigilance? Where was the vigor? Where was the outrage? The American people were deprived of a fair election, and the Republicans — who presumably wanted to get the President's hands off the machinery of power — didn't see what was being done or they didn't want to talk about it or — to voice the last and paranoid-sounding option — they were complicit.

Here's a list — to be lengthened — of things that might have happened:

1. The President's machinations were so devious and brilliant and that it was just too hard for the Republicans to uncover them in time to enlighten the voters.

2. The Republicans had good reason to believe that the American people resisted thinking ill of the famously likeable President and so they pursued campaign strategies that allowed people to maintain this treasured belief. Their idea was: He's a nice guy but it would be good to switch to this other person who's also nice and will do an even better job. That's lame, we can see in retrospect, but it was the decision at the time.

3. The Democrats' theme was the meanness of Republicans, and muckracking and mudslinging would have risked reinforcing that theme. It seemed like a better bet to stay clean, especially once the scrappier candidates — Gingrich and Santorum — lost out to the gentlemanly Romney.

4. Obama's prime target was the Tea Party (which had crushed him in the 2010 midterms), and the establishment Republicans were at odds with the Tea Party movement. I'm not saying I believe this, but sober reflection tells us we need to redraw the line between paranoia and vigilance. The theory is that establishment Republicans appreciated the suppression of the Tea Party.

On Aug. 24, 2011, the Department of Justice sent armed agents into the Gibson Guitar factor in Memphis "confiscating half a million dollars worth of guitar making material is an alleged violation of environmental standards."

Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz is a conservative, and his company eventually settled rather than take matters to court....

Just a few weeks later, the Obama administration squared off against Boeing for daring to set roots in a "right to work" state....

The NLRB complaint against Boeing was eventually dropped, but not before the union got a pretty compensation package as a parting gift.

These data points look very different now than they did at the time, and I wonder how many data points we've missed over the last 4+ years because we were not so paranoid vigilant.

“I don’t have a factual basis to answer the questions that you have asked, because I was recused,” the attorney general said.

On and on Holder went: “I don’t know. I don’t know. . . . I would not want to reveal what I know. . . . I don’t know why that didn’t happen. . . . I know nothing, so I’m not in a position really to answer.”...

But when the Justice Department undermines the Constitution, recusal is no excuse.

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"He moved out and initiated divorce proceedings, but in the time since, I was able to convince him that I am truly repentant and to give our marriage another chance for the sake of our children. The problem I have now is that he says that if we are to stay married, he wants it to be an open marriage. I've tried to tell him that I've gotten that out of my system and I don't want to be with anybody other than him, but he says there just isn't any way he can ever trust me again, he doesn't feel an obligation to be faithful to me anymore, and at least this way we're being honest about it."

Who's more wrong, the wife or the husband? It's easy to say the wife, but the husband is also wrong, because the idea of open marriage should be founded on trust, not mistrust. He's punishing her, deliberately, not pursuing what he believes is a positive way of life. (I'm not recommending polyamory, but if you're doing it as an expression of hostility to your primary partner, you're not doing it the way the prominent proponents say you should. I know... should... why speak of shoulds in the realm of transgression? I do get that. But I'm not one of the promoters of polyamory. I'm just someone who's listened to my share of Dan Savage podcasts.)

What's with the dashes before and after the "b"? Damned editors. If I have to guess the word, get the dashes right. Knob. The Daily News — which is what Drudge linked — must have gotten it from The Daily Mail, which wrote "k**b," getting the asterisks in the right place... and displaying what must be the British decorousness about a word that seems more funny than dirty to an American... at least to this American. The Daily News probably just didn't know what the word was supposed to be.

In February 2010, the Champaign Tea Party in Illinois received approval of its tax-exempt status from the IRS in 90 days, no questions asked. That was the month before the Internal Revenue Service started singling out Tea Party groups for special treatment. There wouldn't be another Tea Party application approved for 27 months.

In that time, the IRS approved perhaps dozens of applications from similar liberal and progressive groups, a USA TODAY review of IRS data shows. As applications from conservative groups sat in limbo, groups with liberal-sounding names had their applications approved in as little as nine months. With names including words like "Progress" or "Progressive," the liberal groups applied for the same tax status and were engaged in the same kinds of activities as the conservative groups.

On a weekday morning, I climbed the stairs to La Casa, took off all my clothes, and, after showering, stepped into a large tub inside an enclosed chamber.

Reading between the lines: The water is reused. Sorry, even though you took a shower, this is icky. I'm not getting the luxury of this at all. Why not take a bath at home with the lights off until you are beyond bored?

Oh cripes, it's just Greg Sargent reading the entrails for a utilitarian polyp.

I was hoping for something more tangible. Something like "Liberals who are dreading the scandal-mania that is taking hold should note that it contains a potential upside: We could steal our souls back."

On point #1, Instapundit doesn't mean Obama was only joking (and therefore he shouldn't be taken seriously or thought to be connected to the actual targeting of enemies). Instapundit means that Obama thought so little of the important principle at stake that a joke could be made of it.

The unequal, politically skewed enforcement of a law is a far more serious problem than the level of harshness of a neutrally enforced law. We can disagree about what the tax laws should be and how strictly or harshly they should be enforced, but everyone knows it is fundamentally wrong to vary the degree of enforcement, selecting victims by their politics. If government cannot be trusted to avoid that fundamental wrong, it cannot be trusted with any power at all. It would be better to wipe the tax code clean and rebuild it without any complicated corners where government officials — great or small — have a place to do their dirty work.

Let's do it! Let's set things up so we are not dependent on the good faith of government officials. Flat tax or national sales tax.

ADDED: Rereading this, I see that I need to distance myself from Epps. Even though I agree we need broad and deep cultural understanding of freedom of speech and that the courts alone cannot preserve it, I don't accept that freedom of speech will die unless "all of us" keep the faith. We have a legal system with constitutional rights because of the danger that the political majority will — in some times and in some circumstances — lose track of these values.

And quite aside from what the people in general think, the individuals who get their hands on power will always be tempted to put their immediate desires ahead of other concerns. No "refresher course" on the First Amendment will overcome that tendency. We need to use law to confine them. Of course, Epps is right that First Amendment law, enforced by courts isn't going to control them enough, but inculcated First Amendment principles are not enough either.

We should do what we can to redesign the structures of power so the inevitable degradation of commitment to freedom will not have such a damaging effect. When it comes to taxes, we do have an obvious legal solution at the statutory level: replace the tax code — with all its hiding places for abuse — with the flat tax or national sales tax.

Within the clenched world of the gay PC police there has been a tightening of the reigns. It’s as if in this historic moment for gay men we somehow still need to be babied and coddled and used as shining examples of humanity and objects of fascination—the gay baby panda—and this is a new kind of gay victimization. The fact that it is often being extolled by other gays in the Name of the Good Cause is doubly stifling.

Okay, Bret. Much as I agree with you about the problems of infantilization and political correctness, I've got to further victimize you. Not you, the gay man. You the writer.

1. A "tightening of the reigns"? Especially when writing under the title "In the Reign of...," you need to know your metaphors. There's a difference between what kings do in their domain and the leather straps a rider uses to control a horse.

2. If you're offering to be the cutting critic and what you're criticizing is putting gay men into the victim role, don't whine about your own victimhood. It's incoherent. Be cuttingly critical and take the consequences.

Factoid about Ellis: "Feminist activist Gloria Steinem was among those opposed to the release of Ellis' book ['American Psycho'] because of its portrayal of violence toward women. Steinem is also the stepmother of Christian Bale, who played Bateman in the film. This coincidence is mentioned in Ellis' mock memoir Lunar Park."

More recently, Ellis got in trouble with the "gay elite" for tweeting that "openly and famously gay Matt Bomer who is publicly married to his partner seemed a weird idea for the role of the very straight BDSM freako Christian Grey in the movie adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey." Ellis needs people to understand — and he's hurt that he was disinvited from the GLAAD awards — that he "never said Gay Actors Can’t Play Straight Roles." Rather, he "thought this because of Matt’s easy openness with being gay... and with baggage that I believe would distract from the heavy sexual fantasy of that particular movie."

A key exchange in the first section of the book is Anastasia’s open questioning of Christian’s sexuality and his insulted denials—with Bomer in the role, it becomes a very META scene. Right now, in this moment, this particular casting would be a distraction—the public/private life of the actor mixed-up with playing a voracious het predator.

But his true inner satisfaction comes when he has a woman in his clutches and can entertain her with a nail gun or a power drill or Mace, or can cut off her head or chop off her arms or bite off her breasts or dispatch a starving rat up her vagina.

"This beast was thirsty for blood. This beast wanted to destroy... I figured my best chance was to run outside by the street so that someone could find me... He had four paws on top of me…he peeled my forehead skin to the back of my head off... Then, he turned me over and tried to bite my stomach and hips. That gave me just a few seconds to curl into a ball and protect my head, which exposed my arm pits and shoulder blades... It doesn’t feel anything. It is a merciless creature... By that time I could feel my body become lifeless... Out of nowhere I heard a horn and these two angles [sic] saved my life..."

In the first report, despite the cries on the 911 call being deemed 'minimum-to-marginal material for identification purposes'... The report seems worthless. But even if one accepts it, since [Trayvon] Martin is excluded as the person screaming in three of the last four screams the logical conclusion is he wasn't the one crying out for help. The inference I take from this is that Martin may have yelled as he started hitting Zimmerman (the first two cries) but Zimmerman was the one crying out in the rest of the screams, which fits with him being punched in the nose and having his head slammed into the ground.

The second report is so absurd I'm wondering if it wasn't a joke. Parts of it are laugh-out-loud funny.

[A]pproximately one second after the start of CALL3, Mr. Zimmerman makes a seemingly religious proclamation, "These shall be." His speech is characterized by the low pitch and exaggerated pitch contour reminiscent of an evangelical preacher or carnival barker....

... The first state report is equivocal and a guesstimate. The second is a joke. The court should exclude these expert reports.

Richard Zeckhauser, the Frank P. Ramsey Professor of Political Economy at Harvard, is on record as saying that “Jason’s empirical work was careful. Moreover, my view is that none of his advisors would have accepted his thesis had he thought that his empirical work was tilted or in error.”...

One particularly disturbing statement came from 23 separate student groups at Harvard:

We condemn in unequivocal terms these racist claims as unfit for Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard University as a whole. Granting permission for such a dissertation to be published debases all of our degrees and hurts the University’s reputation …

Is truth the highest value in our society? I think Sullivan assumes it is, but it most certainly is not. The question is: How can we be smart and scientific and truthful about this truth about truth?

"'I was thrilled to hear that Clive Davis came out as bisexual, being bisexual myself,' or 'Did you hear that same-sex couples will soon be able to marry in Delaware? It means a lot to me since I’m bisexual.'"

From a NYT column attempting serious advice about how to "come out as bisexual at work." I copied those quotes because I could picture a comedy sketch giving those lines to a character who has no clue about how to sound casual around an office water cooler.

Mr. Holder also fielded questions about the seizure of telephone records from reporters and editors at The Associated Press.... Mr. Holder said he was confident that his subordinates had sought the subpoenas in accord with Justice Department regulations...

In 1954, Mrs. Kennedy, newly wed, arrived at the salon and asked for Lawrence, who usually did her hair. Lawrence was not around, so the receptionist paged Mr. Battelle.

Mrs. Kennedy had what was called the Italian cut, which he felt was too short, layered and curly for her tall proportions and big bones, he told Vanity Fair in 2003. He decided to stretch it out by setting it with big rollers. But rollers as big as he wanted did not exist then, so he had some specially made, out of Lucite.

After John F. Kennedy became president, Mr. Battelle perfected the bouffant style that became associated with Mrs. Kennedy. He thought the look would lengthen her head and balance her broad cheekbones. He used some hair spray, but allowed a few wisps to fall away to make her look less “set.”

Goodbye to Kenneth Battelle, who had so much to do with the way women looked in the 1960s. He was 86.

By using the Althouse portal, you can buy things you want and – while paying nothing extra – make a contribution to this blog. We notice. We appreciate it. And only if Woodward and Bernstein bust your secret wide open will we know it's you.

Online life might have something to do with the change, [suggested Michael Sivak of the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Michigan]. “A higher proportion of Internet users was associated with a lower licensure rate,” he wrote in a recent study. “This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that access to virtual contact reduces the need for actual contact among young people.”

I get the sense that younger people are generally less interested in traveling. The idea that travel is the best thing to do with your free time and extra money... that's fading, isn't it? Something old people do.

So... is something happening to us? We're not so adventurous or not so restless or we've overcome the delusion that moving around changes who you are? We're lazy and the couch potatoism has extended into everything about the way we live? We long for the friends and family that our grandparents and great-grandparents had in the days when everyone — in this nostalgic true/false memory — stayed in one town and you had deep roots and connections to all sorts of people who loved and cared for you (or disliked you but at least knew you).

"Sure, one is a twangy Texan with that shit-kicking, boot-wearing thing going on (despite being a double-ivied, cosmopolitan kind of guy). The other is a Jersey bruiser, with a (much-discussed) physique reminiscent of Tony Soprano after a doughnut bender. But both are delivering a booster shot of testosterone to the GOP in a way few have managed to pull off of late...."

Despite the centrality of this image to the GOP, however, precious few of its high-profile players now are apt salesmen for the manly brand....

As for the current team ... Mitt Romney: too much of a doofus. Paul Ryan: ditto, despite the washboard abs. Eric Cantor: too twitchy (manly men do not visibly vibrate with nervous energy). Marco Rubio: too boyish. Jeb Bush: too soft and measured. With his retro Mad Men groove, John Boehner has the potential to be a Don Draper kind of manly man, but he’s too darn weepy.

ADDED: I looked up "shit-kicking" in the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary. It means, "In early use: worthless, contemptible. Later: designating or characteristic of an unsophisticated person from a rural area; (also) tough, belligerent; cf."

Not only do we need to understand the various scandals individually, we need to understand the phenomenon of the sudden outbreak of multiple scandals. I'm calling this phenomenon of clustering Scandalgate and demanding an explanation for it.

Why are we hearing about so many scandals all of a sudden?

The press finally faced up to its self-interest in looking professional and not Obamaphilic.

The administration chose to break multiple stories at once to limit the damage.

Congressional Democrats see self-interest in looking capable of supervising the Executive Branch.

Only Benghazi hurts Hillary, and the Clintons are pulling some strings.

Patients with non-psychotic mental disorders (or who were not mentally ill) could be diagnosed with sluggish schizophrenia. Along with paranoia, sluggish schizophrenia was the diagnosis most frequently used for the psychiatric incarceration of dissenters....

The incidence of sluggish schizophrenia increased because, according to Snezhnevsky and his colleagues, patients with this diagnosis were capable of socially functioning almost normally.

Ironically, reading about "sluggish schizophrenia" may cause you to manifest the very symptoms you are reading about.

A cynic might conclude that these scandals are of a piece. The IRS harassment, focused at an IRS office in the key swing state of Ohio, crippled Tea Party groups during the 2012 election cycle. The blame-the-video spin, meanwhile, obscured the administration's, and the State Department's, culpability in terms of poor security and inept intelligence, while protecting Obama's triumphalist Osama-bin-Laden-is-dead-and-al-Qaeda-is-on-the-ropes election-season line on the war on terror.

Now, "cynic" is the word of choice for politicians who want to lure you away from healthy objectivity and skepticism. It was just a couple days ago that Obama did a graduation speech (at OSU), warning the young about "cynicism":

In Obama's account, sinister (but unnamed) "voices" have been busily corrupting the once-idealistic Generation Y with a siren song of "creeping cynicism" toward ambitious new federal crusades. They'll even "warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices."

People observing the normal things that happen in politics don't deserve to be called "cynics." OED defines "cynic" as:

A person disposed to rail or find fault; now usually: One who shows a disposition to disbelieve in the sincerity or goodness of human motives and actions, and is wont to express this by sneers and sarcasms; a sneering fault-finder.

Oh, what the hell. I'll accept the label. With politicians, we should be cynics. By the way, "cynic" comes from the Greek for dog-like (which you can sort of see in the word currish, which echoes in churlish).

1. The goal of life is Eudaimonia and mental clarity or lucidity (ἁτυφια) - freedom from τύφος (smoke) which signified ignorance, mindlessness, folly and conceit.

2. Eudaimonia is achieved by living in accord with Nature as understood by human reason.

3. τύφος [smoke!] is caused by false judgments of value, which cause negative emotions, unnatural desires and a vicious character.

3. Eudaimonia or human flourishing, depends on self-sufficiency (αὐτάρκεια), equanimity, arete, love of humanity, parrhesia and indifference to the vicissitudes of life (ἁδιαφορία).

4. One progresses towards flourishing and clarity through ascetic practices (ἄσκησις) which help one become free from influences – such as wealth, fame, or power – that have no value in Nature. Examples include Diogenes' practice of living in a tub and walking barefoot in winter.

6. A Cynic practices shamelessness or impudence (Αναιδεια) and defaces the Nomos of society; the laws, customs and social conventions which people take for granted....

So there's your question: What do you want — ἁτυφια or τύφος? Lucidity or smoke?Clarity or choom?